Potato is yum

So I get a lot of ideas. In fact, I come up with probably 5 story ideas every day at least. I’ve made a post previously about why I throw out most of these because they are bad but never really outlined my philosophy for why I believe this is a good approach to ideas for writing and ideas of creative projects in general.

When starting a project, you need to have some kind of emotional tie to it to keep yourself motivated no matter what happens in the project. You cannot get bored of the project. If you get bored of the project, is it really worth doing it? Of course, I’m talking about projects done as hobbies. If you do this stuff as a job you probably will have to utilize a different philosophy as mine revolves entirely around my enjoyment of creating as a means of having fun.

So I said that whenever I get an idea I throw it out right away. This is actually not quite true. In my head is a bunch of ideas and projects I want to do at some point in my life. Let me just list out like the top 10 on my list right now.

• Finish Fool In Space
• Finish Royal Road contest submission
• Titanfall 2 Edit
• Counterstrike Edit
• Youtube intro
• Finish that compost bin in the backyard
• Make a missile game using Conway’s game of life
• Finish setting up the minecraft server for friends
• Write a rougelike gun isekai litrpg

So yeah. I go about my life with tons of ideas in my head at all times. You may ask, “How am I supposed to remember all my good ideas?” Well, that’s exactly why I don’t write down any of my ideas until I commit to doing them. If I think up an idea and instantly write it down, I’ve not let the idea pickle and mature in my subconsciousness. For all I know, the idea could be a stale specimen and be lost in the back of my head never to be remembered every again. Or the idea could be hidden gold with it’s true flavor being brought out by other specimens in the pot. The idea of not writing it down is to make myself need to remember my ideas.

My memory is limited so there is a hard limit to the amount of ideas I can have at any given time. Human memory is also incredibly good at working on things while you are doing something else. I often am brushing my teeth and exclaim “Oh! That would be a great addition to that idea!” and then go into my brain’s memory and slightly alter the idea I had. A great example of this is my royal road contest submission. That idea pickled in my head for about four days before I committed on it. I usually would require an idea to sit in my head for 3-4 months before determining it’s readiness but the contest has a time limit so some concessions have to be made.

The initial idea for the contest was “dragon rider dies and dragon mourns his death.” This could make an excellent story. I’m sure it could be great. But it felt to general. To grand. Too unrelatable. I didn’t have any personal attachment to the story. Why should I care? And if I don’t care about the story, why the hell should anyone else care? So then I thought about the idea. What was good about it? The dragon rider death part sounded great. The dragon mourning sounded great.

From there I remembered my experience of mourning loss and realized that throughout life everyone loses some number of close friends and family. It’s inevitable. So wouldn’t that mean a dragon would lose many riders in their lifespan? Wait… that’s a new idea! So from there I decided “Dragon rider dies and dragon mourns their first rider’s death.”

From there I kept looking at the idea and thinking “How could I inject more of myself, my feelings, my experience, my essence into this idea?” Unlike Fool In Space which is an author self insert story I didn’t want this story to be a self insert. Instead I wanted it to depict a typical human experience. An experience that is deeply human and relatable. I quickly realized that I was onto something and began to write that I will submit. I’m not gonna talk about it anymore because I gotta keep some surprises for the contest. Maybe follow the royal road of my contest submission as I’ll be putting up chapters near the end of the contest. It’s much heavier than anything I usually write. It’s… different. Whenever I write the story my eyes tear up while smiling so I hope that paints a picture for what it’s like. A happy tragedy.

I find that my method of cooking up ideas prevents me from being sidetracked by random ideas as I only take a new idea off the stack when I’ve determined I have space to commit to another idea. My philosophy allows me to let good ideas cook more if all my time is allocated. My thinking is that even if an idea in my barrel is better than the idea in my hands I’d rather take that better idea out of the barrel when it is fully fermented rather than partially through the process. Leaving it in the barrel wouldn’t do anything bad to the idea because even if I forget the idea, the mere existence of the idea would have changed the water in the barrel and influenced every other specimen.

This ideas fermenting in a barrel analogy is kind of a weird one but it has helped me maintain focus. Maybe it’ll be useful for someone else. Who knows. This is just what works for me.

Aight. So here’s the post plan:

• Media Review
• Launch Week Over For My Book
• Wings Of Liberty Is A Masterpiece pt2